RESET: the 2020 call to reset capitalism

On 13 September 1970, the New York Times Magazine published Milton Friedman's essay arguing that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Fifty years later, to the day, a coalition of business networks launched a campaign called RESET, arguing the opposite: that the purpose of business is to create value for everyone it touches, and that the economic system should be redesigned accordingly.

What the campaign asked for

RESET was not a policy platform. It was a narrative campaign built around three shifts, which later became the Imperatives:

• from an economy that treats people and planet as inputs, to one designed for interdependence;
• from capital that concentrates, to capital that is invested for justice;
• from shareholder primacy, to accountability to stakeholders, measured and reported.

The backers claimed to represent more than seventy thousand businesses, twenty million employees and several trillion dollars in revenue and assets under management. Those are membership totals of the participating networks, not a count of companies that changed anything; they describe reach, not results.

The context

The timing was not accidental. In August 2019 the Business Roundtable, a group of large-company chief executives in the United States, had rewritten its statement on the purpose of a corporation to name customers, employees, suppliers and communities alongside shareholders. The pandemic then made the fragility of supply chains, labour markets and public health impossible to ignore. RESET tried to turn that moment into a durable agenda.

A five-year scorecard

Judged by its own three shifts, here is where things stand in 2026. This is our reading of the evidence, with sources linked in the articles section; disagree in the comments if you have better data.

Interdependence: partial progress, mostly through regulation

Climate disclosure moved from voluntary to mandatory in the European Union and several other jurisdictions. Carbon pricing expanded. But the pricing of most other externalities, from biodiversity to mental health at work, is still largely absent.

Justice: the weakest result

Commitments on diversity and inclusive finance peaked in 2020 and 2021, then faced political backlash and quiet retreat in the United States. Community-development and cooperative finance kept growing, but from a small base.

Accountability: the clearest change

Sustainability reporting standards now exist, are being adopted, and are increasingly audited. Executive pay linked to non-financial targets became common in large listed companies, although the targets are often soft. Whether this changes behaviour or only paperwork is the open question for the next five years.

What the critics said, and whether they were right

Critics from the free-market side called RESET a rebranding of ideas the World Economic Forum had promoted for years, and a way for certification businesses to sell their services. Critics from the left called it a corporate attempt to pre-empt regulation with voluntary pledges. Five years on, both have a point: the campaign's durable legacy is the reporting rules it helped normalise, not the voluntary commitments it collected.

Why we keep the name

This site publishes at the address the campaign once used. We are not the campaign, and we do not speak for its members. We keep the page because the question it raised is still the right one: if the rules of the economy are made by people, what would better rules look like, and who is writing them?